Art and Walt Arfons

Competition drove the two brothers apart as they strove for the land-speed record

Art and Walt Arfons from Hemmings Muscle Machines

The pride and the hard- headedness of competition can drive men to dizzying heights and astounding achievements. But it can also turn them against their closest friends and family.

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Walt and Art Arfons were, at one point, closer than just family. Though technically half-brothers and far apart in age--Walt was born in 1920, while Art came along six years later--both served in the Navy during World War II and both became handy with a wrench while working in Art's father's feed mill in Akron, Ohio. In their off hours, the brothers aimed their mechanical talents toward pursuits including a homebuilt airplane and fixing motorcycles. It wasn't until 1952, when they went to take the airplane for a spin and found the airport's access road blocked off by an organized drag race, that the two decided to build a race car.
Their first attempt was crude and, like many of their subsequent cars, built from junkyard-sourced parts. But thanks to the John Deere green paint they slathered over it, the car gave the brothers a name to work with throughout their racing careers: the Green Monster. After a couple years, Walt and Art found out that they could easily obtain used aircraft engines--usually 1,710-cu.in. Allison V-12s--for cheap, mount them in a mid-engine configuration behind the driver, and set top speeds as high as 170 MPH. However, the weight of the Allison-powered dragsters prevented them from getting off the line fast enough, so they usually proved uncompetitive in eliminations, leading them to take their Green Monsters on the road as one of the earliest exhibition acts.
Then came the split. In his book Speed Duel: The Inside Story of the Land Speed Record in the Sixties, Samuel Hawley wrote that nobody, not even the brothers themselves, could point to any one argument or incident that led to the falling out between the two. Hawley couldn't even point to a specific time, just that it happened sometime in the late 1950s after the two built Green Monster 11. However, he wrote that the split likely resulted from Art's intense competitiveness and inability to concede a win, even to his brother.
From that point on, both Walt and Art continued building Green Monsters in Akron in parallel. They lived two doors down from each other and worked in two adjoining halves of a shop, but avoided speaking. As if that weren't enough, in 1959 the NHRA ruled aircraft engines ineligible for competition. Ostensibly, the decision was made for safety, but as Robert C. Post wrote in High Performance: The Culture and Technology of Drag Racing, many people believed the decision was made so Wally Parks and the NHRA could cozy on up to the Detroit automakers, who had nothing to benefit from aircraft-engined cars entering the record books.
The time was ripe, then, for a change. Walt Arfons began experimenting with jet-powered Green Monsters in 1960 when he used a Westinghouse J-46 engine and afterburner to record elapsed times in the seven-second range. Pretty soon, half a dozen jet-powered dragsters were making exhibition runs across the country, but Art Arfons went a different direction, building the Allison-powered Green Monster 15 for a run at the world land-speed record, something the brothers had talked about a few years prior. He topped 300 MPH with it in 1961 before realizing that he, too, needed to switch to jet power.
Backed by Goodyear, Walt built a jet car for land-speed racing as well, and both he and his brother (backed by Goodyear rival Firestone) took their jet-powered land-speed racers to Bonneville in 1962 after a season of testing them out as exhibition drag cars. Over the next few years, the brothers would one-up each other--Art with a J-79-engined car, Walt with a rocket-powered car--all while jostling with Craig Breedlove for the record. Walt, using driver Tom Green, set the record in October 1964 at 413 MPH, then Art topped it three days later at 434 MPH before resetting it again later that month at 536 MPH.
Despite a number of tire blowouts, and despite Walt bowing out from land-speed racing, Art continued chasing the land-speed record in 1965 and 1966, until a 610 MPH crash sent Art to the hospital and led the press to prematurely declare his death. Though that crash effectively ended his land-speed racing career, it did ultimately lead to a sort of reconciliation between him and Walt.
"When it mattered, they really did care about each other," Hawley wrote. "They would never again be buddies, not like in the old days with their motorcycles and home-built airplanes. But much of the animosity between them would remain behind in that hospital room, left in the past."
Walt eventually retired altogether, while Art went into professional tractor pulling and made a brief attempt in the late 1980s and early 1990s to return to land-speed racing. Art died in December 2007, while Walt today lives in Akron.

This article originally appeared in the July, 2011 issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines.